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Friday, April 6, 2012

Breathing well 7:24pm April 6th

So I can't believe I forgot to take this picture and upload it earlier. He is what Owen looks like with his chest now closed. I took this picture just before we left to go check into the Ronald McDonald house.

So after Cassie and I left Owen earlier, we checked into the Ronald McDonald house. It is really nice there. Our room has two twin beds for Cassie and me to sleep in, we have our own personal bathroom with a shower/bathtub, there is a communal dining area, we have space in the fridge and pantry for our own food, there is a really nice activity room and lounge, and there is a game room complete with arcade machines and gaming systems. After we got all of the stuff carried in from what we had at the hospital, Cassie decided that she needed to take a nap and I ran back to her aunt's house to get the stuff that we had left there. When I got back from her aunt's house (we actually had more stuff still at her aunt's house than we had up at the hospital), the group that was providing the food for the residents of the Ronald McDonald house was there bringing the food in. So before Cassie and I came back to the hospital to see Owen, we ate a delicious meal consisting of lots of different casseroles and deserts. After we finished eating we came back to the hospital to visit Owen. When we got here, Owen's nurse said that he has been doing really well. Earlier, they turned his sedatives way down and and Owen was pretty much fully awake and looking around. When his heart rate started to go up, they thought he might be uncomfortable so they gave him some morphine, so right now he is pretty chill. I think he is sleeping, but he seems to be more responsive than he was earlier.

This is a picture of Owen's ventilator. I took another picture of his ventilator because I noticed something interesting about it. Yesterday the waveforms on the monitor were very uniform and evenly spaced because the ventilator was doing all of the work breathing for Owen. If you notice in this picture the waveforms aren't identical, and thought you can't really tell from this little sample, the spacing isn't uniform. I asked his nurse if they changed something with his ventilator, but she said that the difference I noticed is just because Owen is breathing more on his own. The smaller waveforms are the breaths that he is taking completely on his own. If you look closely on the monitor, on the bottom the ventilator it is set to 10 breaths per minute and he is taking nearly twice that number of breaths. Hopefully that means that they can take him off of the ventilator pretty soon. I know it is helping him and making sure he doesn't have any issues, but it is still hard to see him with all of the tubes and wires coming out of him.

Bear

About Me

Join my husband and I on our life changing journey as we deal with the ups and downs of our new baby with a congenital heart defect. This will be a chronicle of our life as it changes from just the two of us, to becoming a family.